energy and climate change policy in the UK Parliament from Alan Whitehead MP

So…..how safe is that Husky?

Well it’s not going very well on the renewables and low carbon front is it.? Ed Davey, until recently in charge of the whole business, doesn’t think it is, asking recently in a tweet:

‘does Cameron plan to strangle a husky given green deal cuts after wind and solar hits, end to Ccl exemption and zero homes abolition’

Must have been a titanic feat of character editing to get all that in 140 characters, I must say, but it does perhaps encapsulate the central question: why is all this suddenly happening? As Ed says, we have had in very short order, the apparent termination of support for onshore wind, a radical deflation of support for solar (both the cheapest renewables currently around by the way) the rug pulled smartly under the whole zero carbon homes programme, in that ..er.. there won’t be one anymore, and the clever juggling of the climate change levy so that it is now quite simply a levy, with the involvement in climate change abruptly terminated. Oh and to add to that, we have the prospect of the levy control framework being bust and quite possibly (Amber Rudd, Ed’s successor as DECC SOS was conspicuously coy when I asked her about it this week) no more auctions for the award of contracts for difference for renewable technologies until after 2020.

So is it just about strangling a husky, or to put it another way, getting on with ‘cutting the green crap’ now that Conservatives can make the decisions all by themselves and without those pesky coalition partners to think about? I’m not sure it is as simple as that, because what is clear at the same time, is that the new government remains, it says, fully signed up to Britains ‘leading role at the Paris climate change summit in December’, and apparently committed to the achievement of the carbon budgets that go along with Britain’s offer (40% reduction greenhouse gas levels over 1990 by 2030, or effectively, the achievement of the fourth carbon budget, presently on its own admission, difficult to do on the basis of present measures). So you might expect some new measures, or at least an indication of which measures will get top billing over the next period.

Well as we know, despite the explicit indications that ‘ action is needed in this parliament to ensure that the pace of emission reductions accelerates whilst supporting economic growth’ from the committee on climate change in its 2015 progress report to parliament, the initial actions of the new government have been to take a machete to a number of support schemes, ostensibly on the grounds that they are too expensive to support and will impact adversely on customers bills.

And the striking thing about the machete-ed measures is that each of them represent, essentially, a different way of changing behaviour in a green and lower carbon direction. You might expect a government reviewing what direction it best wants to take in meeting carbon budgets to refine what kind of measures it wants to support – and in effect which measures it believes are most compatible with its philosophy of government and which are not. Measures to change behaviour , we might schematically represent as follows (in descending order of intervention).

Put a tax on ‘ bads ‘ and exempt ‘goods’ so that behaviour changes towards the ‘goods’

Put an obligation on companies to do greener things as part of their operating codes.

Encourage people to invest to save using their own bills by greening their environment or energy use.

Introduce regulations that at minimal cost introduce a largely unnoticed ‘green shift’ in the ways people live.

We can fit each of the machete-ed measures into this:

we are no longer going to tax ‘bads’ (1) since the collapse of the climate change levy doesn’t perversely save any consumers money: it merely equalises payments across the board into treasury: it is just free money for government, with no behavioural purpose behind it.

We aren’t going to place obligations on companies (2) with the constraint on the levy control framework and the end of renewable obligation to advantage renewables.

We are not going to encourage people anymore to invest in their own energy savings by using the power of their present bills (3) with the ending of the Green deal.

And finally, we are not even going to introduce relatively mild and cost effective regulation (4) that moves the market in a more energy efficient and lower carbon direction by requiring a general framework for building homes that are increasingly energy mean in their operation.

So that leaves a rather frightening conclusion. If we believe that the government is sincere in maintaining its carbon change objectives and it’s willingness to address the consequences of its own carbon budget commitments, then at some stage it will have to introduce measures to change behaviour or investment patterns that look rather like the measures they have just abandoned. Alternatively it may now be that the single and sole mechanism they think will bring is change about is….the market. And since Lord Stern, as I remember notably described climate change as ‘ the worlds biggest market failure’ I’ m not sure right now that it is a strategy that will reliably deliver.